In today's technologically driven world, the importance of innovation and product development is growing. Businesses must develop innovative products faster and more efficiently. This speed-to-market is achieved by maximizing effectiveness in both the product design and manufacturing stages of a product development cycle.
However, the perfection, or, at least the improvement of these stages may be stifled due to the heterogeneous hardware and/or software needs of any particular product or types of products developed by a business. Further, it goes without saying that lengthy product development cycles may have devastating effects on a business's bottom line. For example, one company may engage in the business of developing and producing several different types of medical devices, each with their own set of varying hardware and software configurations.
Despite the diversity that may exist among a family of medical device products, a lot of functionality may still be identified as common to the product family. For example, much of the software and/or hardware components in many medical devices may be common to a given family of devices produced by a given business. By exploiting these commonalities, development of several different products of a given product family may be performed in parallel. Consequently, a product(s) development cycle may be accelerated.
Therefore, there is a need for genericized medical device software architecture reflecting these commonalities, to be used in multiple products' development cycle. The architecture may allow for the changing needs of a business and its products, while still supporting a quick development cycle. Once a product using this software architecture is fielded, it may easily be extended and maintained without the creation of a whole new product.